ElHombreAlex--FTL-Faster-Than-Light-VR/docs/STATUS.md

Project status

Prepared source snapshot: 0.1.0-alpha.1, 2026-10-03, with subsequent gameplay refinements described below.

This is a playable experimental client connected to the real game. It is suitable for technical enthusiasts who can follow the source setup instructions and help test supported versions. A broad public release and a portable compiled installer are still future work.

Implemented

Area	Current behavior
Campaign	FTL runs its normal campaign, events, difficulty, combat rules, audio and saves
Ships	Dynamic local layouts, extruded hull presentation, rooms, weapon mounts, opposing bows in combat and stable movable encounter placement
HUD	Compact original status/crew panel follows the headset first at a fixed readable size; lower strip removed; clamps 8 cm above the transformed hull/shield only when its movement would intersect the ship; full main menus remain head-relative
Navigation	Available actions only; actual sector map appears above/ahead of the pilot room and faces the viewer
Menus/dialogs	Main menus remain 2D; in-run native shop/ship, pause-menu and Options windows appear only above the ship; event choices float in the encounter; BUY/SELL panels are retained
Crew	Native positions/tasks/selection, animated procedural race models, grab preview and native move orders; occupied crew face the viewer
Targeting	Weapon and beam room targeting; persistent player-owned numbered native locks with red/yellow autofire colors, actual beam endpoints/direction and flak spread radius; native mind-control, teleporter and hacking target routing
Systems	Dpad Up and a Navigation button open System Power; native capped reactor availability, storm loss and battery availability remain separate
Doors	Open/closed, locked, damaged/hacked state and thin tier-dependent armor driven by native strength
Combat visuals	Shields/super shields, weapon charge strips/pips, native firing/impact/projectile paths, native miss cues/pass-by presentation and enemy hull bar using locally imported vanilla art
Drones	Distinct procedural space/interior families and Combat/Beam/Defense Mk II hardware; deployment/power state, native render-space placement and visible muzzle shots with native progress/outcomes
Hazards	Room fire and cross-shaped breach tiles, oxygen-dependent air wisps, surrounding asteroid/sun/nebula/storm/pulsar presentations and native jump star stretch along the ship bow with arrival reset
Room feedback	Native role icons and permission-aware condition colors; no floor health/status bars or counters; normal sensor fog still applies
Input	Steam Frame actions, generic fallback profiles, controller infographic, equipment-name/family/ammo action wheel defaulting to weapons/drones on every opening, and QWERTY rename keyboard
Lifecycle	Isolated game copy, fingerprinted hooks, separate hs_ftlvr_ saves, pre-launch backup and graceful save/exit

Verification recorded during development

Latest targeting, jump and drone refinements

The source now renders the player's native placed target state as numbered room locks, retaining autofire color, both beam endpoints and native flak radius. Marks remain attached through pause and encounter placement changes; missing targets, destroyed receivers and ended encounters remove them. Only player-owned weapon targets supply these marks. Jump stretch follows the transformed player ship bow and the native jumping flag; map opening/FTL charging do not start it. Arrival dialogs reset the sky even while a native jump flag is still clearing. Every wheel opening defaults to weapons/drones, with event choices retaining their separate context.

Procedural drone geometry has distinct family silhouettes and Combat/Beam/Defense Mk II variants. Positive native drone IDs attach shots to the visible muzzle in the drone's current render space; an ambiguous negative ID falls back to its native point at drone height. Bullets preserve their launch point while the drone continues orbiting, and continuing beam sweeps remain attached to the emitter. Native projectile presence, progress, pause and outcomes remain authoritative. The HUD's intruder-warning mask is scoped to its warning region and preserves glyphs, faint shadow/fringe coverage and neighboring controls while making the backdrop transparent.

The combined Python suite passed 44 tests and eleven Godot suites passed, including graphical Vulkan UI/controller/frame checks. Target-lock, jump-star and drone gallery/laser/beam fixtures were rendered and inspected on the RTX 4060 Ti. Drone fixtures produced no invented impacts. Twelve actual native intruder-warning blink captures retained all 1,458 glyph pixels while correcting faint shadow coverage; the normal native HUD frame was unchanged.

A fresh disposable copied profile verified actual normal targeting, native target clearing and autofire. An ordinary click on a connected beacon produced native jumping=true through snapshot sequences 96–134, then the arrival dialog at sequence 135; fuel decreased by one. The bridge exited cleanly with no errors. Production archive/settings were restored, and all four campaign hashes plus both executable fingerprints remain unchanged. These are native/desktop checks. Physical Steam Frame comfort and stereo performance remain to test; earlier native evidence below belongs to its recorded revision.

Both standalone folders pass setup checks and their desktop Vulkan launch/exit wrappers; VR preflight passes. The development copy also passes its desktop launch/exit after refreshing an older local extraction manifest. The matching 125-file source-only package passes publication checks with zero failures or warnings. Runtime dependencies, game assets, saves and private QA fixtures remain excluded, and license notices are unchanged.

Existing installations must rerun Installation step 5 with the current tools/extract_ftl.py against their original owned archive. It imports the eight normal/yellow placed reticle PNGs for weapon slots 1–4 into ignored local data. Game artwork is not included in this source release.

Preceding HUD clearance and menu correction

HUD collision clearance is 8 cm, reduced by 6 cm while preserving headset-following priority and the ship/shield intersection guard. Separate native pause-menu and Options draw methods are suppressed only during the supplemental HUD pass; the original capture still supplies their complete floating panels. In-run panel ownership also takes priority over a simultaneous native menu flag. Initial and hangar menus keep their full headset screen.

That revision passed 40 Python tests and focused Vulkan HUD-layout/input checks on the RTX 4060 Ti. Native before/after captures from a separate QA profile verified Ship, pause-menu and Options panels: duplicate HUD pixels were absent after the fix and world-panel content was retained. These are desktop/native capture checks; physical Steam Frame comfort and stereo performance still need the maintainer's playtest.

The updated prepared folder passed RUN-VR.cmd --smoke, and the GitHub Desktop checkout passed RUN-FTL-VR.cmd --smoke: Vulkan desktop rendering, clean client logs, no bridge errors and disconnected bridges after graceful exit. Both folders passed CHECK-SETUP.cmd; VR launch --check passed separately. Production archive/settings were restored, hooks refreshed and all four campaign hashes verified again after both launches. Private QA fixtures are absent. The matching 120-file source package passed publication checks with no failures or warnings. These checks do not exercise the physical headset.

Existing installations must rerun Installation step 4, which now also resolves neighboring MenuScreen.zhl and OptionsScreen.zhl signatures. The launcher rejects older hook files before starting the game.

Preceding HUD, wheel and launch corrections

The gameplay HUD uses a headset-relative pose whenever it has room. Collision checks include the transformed hull/shield envelope and the panel's swept movement, so looking down cannot carry it through the ship. The wheel now handles empty native drone lists without losing equipped weapon entries. Room-floor bars and counters are removed. Launcher corrections expose failures and keep runtime files local.

That revision passed 38 Python tests and nine Godot suites in the prepared FTL-Tabletop-VR folder. The suites include native empty-drone-list normalization, defensive wheel parsing, headset-relative HUD placement/collision checks and removal of room-floor bars. UI, controller and frame-transport suites used actual GPU rendering on the RTX 4060 Ti.

Actual RUN-DESKTOP.cmd --smoke and RUN-VR.cmd --smoke launched the isolated FTL process and Godot client, then exited successfully with clean client logs and no bridge errors. The GitHub Desktop checkout's RUN-FTL-VR.cmd --smoke alias passed the same combined launch/exit check. These smoke tests use desktop rendering; VR preflight passed separately. A copied save profile opened the current campaign, paused it and supplied actual Artemis Missiles and Burst Laser Mark II entries to a GPU-rendered wheel check; the drone-equipment collection was normalized to a list and bridge errors remained empty.

All four original campaign hashes remained unchanged; the original save prefix/settings were restored and Steam/lab executable fingerprints remained unchanged. These checks establish the desktop-wrapper and native wheel paths. Physical Steam Frame comfort, stereo performance and clean-machine setup remain unverified for these changes.

Preceding gameplay refinements

This revision introduced a compact spatial gameplay HUD retaining native status/crew controls, direct Power access, localized equipment wheel metadata, storm-aware free-power presentation, native miss feedback, cross-shaped breaches and per-room system condition presentation. Enemy system condition colors follow native information permissions. Detailed floor bars introduced in that revision have since been removed.

That revision passed 27 Python tests and nine Godot suites, including HUD-layout and damage-visual checks. Headless and Vulkan HUD checks covered crop/picking, fixed-size placement and transformed-envelope clearance; damage checks covered condition visibility, misses and breaches. Controller UI checks included localized equipment/ammo, bounded names, unchanged-content redraws and capped power/battery separation.

Actual native ion-storm state was checked: 8 installed / 4 usable reactor bars, 4 raw available / 0 usable free. Native equipped Burst Laser/Artemis titles and ammo metadata, enemy system damage/repair and breach tiles were checked. The real missed flag/event path was verified using a private native projectile and forced Evasion.MISS; this verifies integration, not random evasion rates.

Production combined Vulkan launch/save/exit smoke passed: exit 0, clean client log, no bridge errors and a disconnected bridge. All four campaign file hashes match the fresh pre-test backup; source and packed Lua match, QA fixtures are absent, both original/lab executable hashes remain unchanged and final process inventory shows no owned FTL/Godot processes. Physical Steam Frame comfort and complete campaigns remain open.

Check	Evidence and limits
Real-game startup	Main menu, hangar, new game, event choices and combined client/bridge startup checked
Crew and doors	Native crew selection, room movement, station return, modifiers and upgraded door state checked
Navigation	Actual map opening, beacon selection, fuel consumption and new event checked
Weapons/combat	Player laser/missile targeting, enemy fire, shield/hull impact and native hull damage checked
Systems	Power operations for installed powerable systems, native mind control and teleportation effects checked
Hacking	Enemy room targeting accepted; attachment/effect completion remains unverified
UI	Native HUD during Tactical/map/store/event/ship modes; enemy-region transparency; BUY/SELL content; rename input and original fonts checked across development revisions
Drones	Native equipment/special/global lists deduplicated; actual combat and interior battle-drone state inspected
Automated tests	Current 44 Python tests and eleven Godot suites pass; native normal/cleared/autofire targets, jump/arrival and warning blink captures pass; previous revision results are recorded above
Desktop graphics	Vulkan rendering and model/UI inspection checked on RTX 4060 Ti 8 GB
Save handling	Fresh copied-profile native checks and final launch/exit smokes preserve all four campaign hashes; production prefix/archive/settings and both executable fingerprints are verified
Steam Frame play	Maintainer confirmed playability and substantial partial runs; latest changes need further hardware coverage

The automated suite uses synthetic fixtures for many edge cases. A passing test does not establish that every race, layout, weapon, drone, hazard or boss encounter has been exercised in a campaign.

Performance: what the measurements mean

• The old Tactical texture path delivered about 6.30 updates/second in its measured consumer case.
• The raw RGBA path reached 29.09 in the same consumer case and about 27.89–28.60 in complete desktop scene checks, including an asteroid scene.
• Tactical uses 960×540 capture with a 30 Hz target. Jump/maps and native windows keep 1280×720. The independent native HUD targets 10 Hz.
• These are capture/texture-delivery measurements. They are not stereo headset FPS, motion-to-photon latency or SteamVR frame-time measurements.

Known limitations and remaining work

Before a wider player release

1. Test setup from this standalone repository on a clean Windows machine.
2. Measure physical Steam Frame readability, hand-screen steadiness, pointer latency and stereo frame pacing after the latest changes.
3. Complete campaign coverage: Flagship phases, ship layouts/races, boarding, cloaking, beams/bombs, drones and hazard combinations.
4. Verify hacking-drone arrival, attachment and resulting effect end to end.
5. Check long-session transition/capture recovery and graceful shutdown under failure conditions.

Compatibility and polish

• The preparer accepts only the fingerprinted Steam Windows 1.6.14 input and official rollback to 1.6.9. Unknown executables are rejected deliberately.
• GOG PKG extraction works; the complete GOG executable/loader route is not verified.
• Other headsets/controller profiles, Linux/macOS and FTL overhaul combinations are not verified.
• Native game rules remain authoritative. VR hazard animation and some projectile/drone presentations are approximations, rather than complete reproductions of their 2D appearance or timing.
• HUD follows the headset until a collision would occur; a raised or oversized table can then push the panel above the ship. Retest that transition physically when moving/resizing the encounter.
• A source setup is supplied; compiled client distribution, export packaging and an end-user installer are not yet validated.
• Python uses pinned Frida/Capstone and minimum Pillow/NumPy versions. Other combinations need testing.

Useful next tests

Start with the supported setup. Report the exact game/loader/client versions, controller interaction profile, whether the problem occurs in VR or desktop, and steps to reproduce. For performance, distinguish stale Tactical textures from low headset frame rate. Use the issue forms and follow CONTRIBUTING.md.